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17
Jan, 2022
lawyer reviews checklist

By OppGen

The Ultimate Law Firm SEO Checklist

Law firms that aren’t using search engine optimization (SEO) as part of their digital marketing strategy are missing out. 

SEO helps your law firm’s website rank higher on search engines, increases your visibility with your target audience, and brings your firm more clients through organic searches.

Our law firm SEO checklist will help your firm get started with optimizing your website and kick off your SEO strategy to help increase your organic visibility and traffic from Google and other search engines. 

For even more SEO optimization advice for your law firm, contact us today.

Table of Contents

What is SEO?

SEO is the strategic work done on, off, and behind the scenes of your website to help you rank higher on Google. The goal of SEO is to increase the quality and quantity of organic traffic your firm brings to your website. 

SEO involves everything from improving the speed, responsiveness, and user-friendliness of your website to targeting the keywords and phrases your ideal clients are searching for on Google, and more. 

Why is this so important for law firms?

Because when your potential clients need an attorney, they go to Google first.  

Let’s say run a personal injury firm in your area. When potential clients need an attorney, they’ll go to Google first, even before they’ll reach out for personal recommendations. 

They’ll look for attorneys by searching for terms and phrases like “personal injury attorney near me” or “car accident lawyer in my area.” 

The better your SEO, the higher you’re going to rank for searches like these and others related to your practice area and services. The better you rank, the greater the odds that these clients will come to your website, vs. your competitors. 

3 Pillars of Law Firm SEO

Your law firm SEO strategy needs to cover the three key pillars of SEO in order to be successful.

1. Technical SEO

Is your website fast and user-friendly? Does it work well on mobile devices? Is it easy for Google to crawl and index? 

If SEO work was described as a car, your technical SEO would be everything under the hood that makes your car fast, smooth, efficient, responsive, and fun to drive.

2. On-Page SEO

Your law firm’s on-page SEO addresses the visible content on your website. 

On-page SEO involves optimizing your practice’s website content for relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for. Effective on-page SEO strategies naturally incorporate keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for to find an attorney, directly into your website copy and text. 

Quality on-page SEO content starts with… 

  • Answering your client’s questions, in regards to your practice area and services. 
  • Providing solutions to their problems that your firm is uniquely qualified to handle. 

3. Off-Page SEO

This aspect of SEO addresses other websites on the internet that link to or reference your firm’s site. The more authoritative and relevant websites you have linking back to your website, the more credibility you build with Google and your audience.

You can build your own off-page links by creating business profiles on helpful directories such as:

  • Google
  • Yelp
  • Avvo
  • Findlaw

Now that we have the pillars of SEO covered, let’s jump into setting up with your law firm SEO checklist…

Law Firm SEO Basics

This section focuses on getting the most important tools, accounts, and profiles you’ll need for analyzing and improving your SEO. 

We’ll be covering how to… 

  • Set up Google Analytics for your law firm
  • Set up Google Search Console
  • Connect Console and Analytics
  • Install an SEO plugin on your website

The set up of a solid SEO strategy can be complicated and overwhelming. Especially if you haven’t done this before. 

If you need professional assistance and support with your law firm’s SEO strategy, schedule a strategy call with our SEO team at OppGen today. 

Set Up Google Analytics for Your Law Firm 

Google Analytics gives your firm the ability to track key data that’s tied to your SEO and website performance. These tools help us track valuable data like: 

  • How much website traffic you’re getting. 
  • What pages your visitors are going to or finding the most helpful. 
  • How and what channels your visitors use to find you. 
  • Phone calls, contact form submissions, and chats that potential customers are making through or on your website.

To track this valuable data, you need to have a Google Analytics account.

Start by going to google.com/analytics and either create an account by clicking “Start for free” or sign in to your Google account by clicking “Sign in to Analytics.”

Set Up Google Search Console

Once you’ve finished setting up your law firm’s Google Analytics account, it’s time to set up Google Search Console. 

Google Search Console is another free Google service that allows you to monitor and troubleshoot your website’s appearance and performance. You can use it to find and fix technical errors, submit sitemaps, see backlinks, view queries people are using to search for your law firm, and much more. 

After setting it up, be sure to link your Google Search Console and Google Analytics account for advanced tracking and deeper insights into your law firm’s website data and performance. 

Install an SEO Plugin on Your Website

Another quick, easy, and free SEO win for your law firm is installing an SEO plugin on your website. 

Our preferred website creation platform is WordPress, which powers around 40% of all websites on the web. They have some of the industry’s best free and paid SEO plugins for websites.

The most popular, widely-used, and highest-rated SEO plugins on WordPress include:

Only download and activate one of these plugins to use on your law firm’s website. There are tons of great training resources for each of them you can find online so that you can start improving your law firm’s SEO.

Technical SEO Checklist for Law Firms

As we mentioned, technical SEO focuses on the technical aspects of your website, like site speed, design, responsiveness, user-friendliness, and mobile performance. These are all ranking factors search engines consider when ranking websites.

Two core aspects of technical SEO are:

  • Making sure your law firm’s website is mobile-friendly
  • Monitoring and optimizing your website’s speed

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

Your ideal clients use search engines on their phones more than any other device. 

In fact, 54.4% of all website traffic in Q4 of 2021 came from mobile. 

Your law firm’s website has to be mobile-friendly. This is one of the first things Google takes into consideration when crawling your website and configuring how to rank it.

A mobile-friendly site is one that loads quickly and is easy to navigate on any mobile device. Keeping a simple, uncluttered, straightforward website design makes a huge difference in increasing site speed and creating a better user experience on mobile devices.

How can you see if your website is mobile responsive?

Start with running your website through Google’s Test My Site Tool. This will give you direct feedback from Google on how your website is performing on mobile, and what you can improve.

Next, you can use Google Chrome’s free inspection tool to see what your website looks like on a variety of mobile devices. 

All you need to do is… 

  • Go to your website.
  • Right-click anywhere on the page.
  • Then left-click on “Inspect.”

Google will reload the page in its Inspect view.

At the top of the page, you’ll see a thin white bar that says “Dimensions” along with the name of a mobile device that your browser is simulating (such as an iPhone X). This means you are looking at your website as it would appear on the mobile device you’ve selected. 

Next to the name of the mobile device, there is a small triangle. Click it for a dropdown list of other mobile devices. You can test different types of mobile devices and their different dimensions (your website will look different on an iPad Pro vs a Galaxy Fold phone).

The Inspect tool makes it easy for you to see what your website looks like on mobile devices and if there are any issues with your website’s mobile version.

Check Your Law Firm’s Website Speed

Speed is another critical website ranking factor for Google. Your law firm needs to be fast and load quickly to rank. The slower your website, the bigger of a detriment it is to your SEO. 

In fact, mobile responsiveness and speed alone can be the difference between ranking on page one for your target keywords and phrases, to not ranking at all. 

To check your site’s speed, go to Google’s Page Speed Insights tool and enter your website’s URL and click “Analyze.”

Google’s Page Speed Insights tool will rate your website’s speed, and give you detailed notes and steps on how to improve it. 

Keep in mind that the Page Speed Insights tool inspects a single page at a time, so you will want to eventually run speed tests on all pages on your website. 

Pro Tip: Use your Google Analytics to uncover what pages on your website generate the most traffic. Run a speed test on those first to see what you can improve to help them rank better.

Need help improving your law firm’s site speed and mobile-friendliness? 

Contact our SEO team at OppGen today for a free SEO audit of your law firm’s website.

Make Sure Your Firm’s Website Pages are Secure

Google (and your website visitors) need to see that your website is secure.

If your website URLs are still using HTTP, you need to make the switch to HTTPS. 

HTTP URLs are a sign to Google and your audience that your site pages are not secure. 

This puts your firm at a major disadvantage for ranking. It also makes your website more hackable, so it’s a security breach waiting to happen. If your law firm’s website may contain highly sensitive firm or client information, you need to secure your website. 

If you’ve made the switch over to HTTPS from an HTTP site, be sure that you set up 301 redirects that forward your website visitors from your HTTP pages, to the HTTPS address.

On-Page SEO Checklist for Law Firms

Like we mentioned earlier, on-page SEO is all about your website’s content. Out of all of the different pieces of SEO, you have the most control over on-page SEO.

Keyword Research and On-Page SEO and for Law Firms

On-page SEO encompasses the content and pages you create and publish to your law firm’s website. 

It involves optimizing the pages of your website by strategically incorporating keywords and phrases your target audience is using to search for your law firm on Google. 

These are the exact terms your target audience is using when searching for a law firm or attorney in their area. This is why keyword strategy is a critical piece of law firm SEO. 

Thankfully, there are a plethora of tools you can use to aid you in keyword research. We recommend investing in an industry-leading SEO and keyword tool like ahrefs or SEMrush. 

These pieces of software not only help you identify what keywords your target audience is searching for, but also have a full suite of tools for helping your firm with on-page, off-page, and technical SEO as well.  

Off-Page Checklist: SEO for Law Firms

Off-page SEO has a few major components:

  • Building out a strong network of backlinks on other, credible websites, which link back to your firm’s site.
  • Creating profiles on relevant online directories like Google Business Profile, Yelp, Avvo, FindLaw, and social media. 
  • Managing your law firm’s reputation on those directories.

These steps work to increase your firm’s online visibility and reputation, both of which are critical to ranking on search engines. 

Some important steps for getting started with off-page SEO for law firms are:

  • Setting up your Google Business Profile page
  • Adding your law firm to relevant legal directories and listings
  • Posting content to social media
  • Encouraging happy clients to leave positive reviews for

Set Up Your Law Firm’s Google Business Profile Page

A Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a must for any business. These free listings allow you to respond to client reviews, post updates, and put your law firm’s location on the (Google) map.

Google has some simple steps you can follow to set up or claim your law firm’s Google Business profile. 

Add Your Law Firm to Online Legal Directories

One important off-page SEO ranking factor is link building. Link building is when other websites have links that send users to your website.

Google and other search engines delineate between trusted websites and resources vs. ones lacking credibility. You want sites with credibility and authority to link back to your website. 

The more credible sites you have linking back to your law firm’s website, the greater credibility you build with search engines.

The challenging part is that it’s difficult to ensure high-domain authority sites will link to you. 

That’s where legal directories come in. 

Many online legal directories have established domain authority and credibility, which is why it’s important to create a business profile for your firm on these directories (Avvo, Findlaw, etc.). Plus it makes your law firm easier for prospective clients to find. 

Post Content to Social Media

Along with creating listings on legal directories, you can also start building up more backlinks by posting content to your law firm’s social media pages on a regular basis.

Encourage Clients to Leave Positive Reviews

Now that your law firm has a Google Business Profile, legal directory listings, and social media pages ready to go, all that’s left for you to do is ask your happy clients for reviews. 

Getting as many glowing 5-star reviews as possible tells search engines your firm does great work. In turn, they’ll reward you with better visibility on search engines results pages, and in the maps section of local search results. 

Improve Your Law Firm SEO with OppGen

Law firm SEO is an ongoing process and a full-time job. It requires staying up-to-date on the latest Google algorithm updates and SEO best practices. It’s a responsibility that requires the expertise of a skilled law firm marketing partner. 

At OppGen Marketing, we have a dedicated SEO team with years of experience in law firm SEO.

Schedule a strategy call with our team today so we can help you improve the digital footprint and online visibility of your firm.  

07
Dec, 2021
google my business introduction page on a computer screen

By OppGen

Google My Business Updates its Name and More

On November 4, 2021, Google announced that it was going to rename Google My Business to Google Business Profile. This announcement coincided with other updates to its business listing service as well.

Why is Google Renaming Google My Business?

While Facebook’s recent decision to rename its parent company to Meta raised some eyebrows in the media, Google’s reason for renaming Google My Business is far less controversial.

Google is renaming the platform to more adequately describe its existing services as well as the updates and new features it’s making to the business profile management system.

What Other Changes is Google Going to Make to Google My Business?

Goodbye, Google My Business App…

Other than the fact Google My Business is going to be called Google Business Profile, Google intends to retire the Google My Business app in 2022. 

… Hello, Google Business Profile Manager

Even though the Google My Business app will no longer be necessary in 2022, you still have options for managing your business’s listing on the web. The console you’ll use is pretty much the same as the Google My Business listing manager, except it’ll be renamed and rebranded as Business Profile Manager. There will be a redirect set up, so even if you are in the habit of using the Google My Business URL, you’ll still end up right where you need to be to manage your listing.

A Push for Single-Location Businesses to Manage Their Listing on Google Maps and Search

Google has mentioned it prefers businesses with single listings to manage their businesses in Google Search or Maps. This is an option that’s been around for quite some time.  Conversely, Google encourages larger businesses with multiple locations to use the Business Profile Manager console.

However, there is a new feature for claiming and verifying your business directly from Google Search and Google Maps.

Updates to Local Google Ads Campaign Budgets in Performance Planner

This is not necessarily a Google Business Profile-related update, but it’s important to know about local search ad campaigns that can impact your Google Business Profile.

The Google Ads’ Performance Planner tool will now allow you to create plans for your local campaigns’ advertising spend, as well as see how changes to your local search ad campaigns could affect metrics and overall performance.

Other New Features

We will likely see more updates to the Business Profile Manager throughout the coming months.  Here are some new features you can expect to see very soon:

  • Call history
  • Messaging directly from Google Search
  • Message read receipt options in Google Search and Google Maps

How Will These Changes Affect My Business’s Listing(s)?

The web interface is not changing much when it comes to the Google Business Profile, but the biggest changes will be the push for smaller single-location businesses to edit their Google Business Profile directly on Google Search and/or Maps and the retirement of the Google My Business app.

If you have any questions about these changes, don’t hesitate to contact OppGen today. We’ll be more than happy to talk you through these changes and how you can adapt to them as quickly and effectively as possible.

Featured image © tecmark UK via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0

15
Nov, 2021
doctor checks his phone for his clinic's Yelp reviews

By OppGen

Doctor Reviews on Yelp

Yelp is perhaps best known for small business reviews (think restaurants and salons), but the well-known directory listing website is also a place for patients to leave reviews for doctors,  medical practices, and clinics.

If your medical practice does not have a presence on Yelp, it’s time to claim your business page. For even more information about the importance of Yelp listings for doctors, contact OppGen Marketing.

 

Why Doctors Need a Yelp Listing

To Find New Patients

The top reason why doctors need to have a Yelp listing is simple: it helps bring in more patients.

It is crucial for medical practices to have a strong online presence, and that means you need to have more than just your website up and running. You need to have active social media accounts, a Google My Business listing, and positive reviews

However, Google My Business listings are only one place where new patients can find you.

Other popular medical- and doctor-specific directories include:

Your clinic needs to be as easy for prospective patients to find as possible. That means creating and maintaining multiple listings on relevant directories like Yelp and those listed above. 

 

Off-Page SEO

Although Google My Business listings are growing in popularity because of the unique advantages they offer, it’s still a good idea to have listings in several directories,  especially on popular sites like Yelp.

Directory listings are critical for off-page search engine optimization (SEO). Off-page SEO looks at your website through the lens of other sites. This means search engines like Google are seeing where your practice’s website is being mentioned on the web through backlinks — links on other sites that link back to your site. Directories are an easy way to acquire backlinks, and Yelp is a valuable one to have.

Getting positive reviews is another key aspect of a winning off-page SEO strategy. Having a lot of five-star reviews on your listings sends a signal to search engines that your business does high-quality work. In turn, the search engine will likely have your site rank higher for searches related to your services.

Off-page SEO, directory management, and positive reviews are proven SEO strategies for gaining visibility in your market, increasing traffic to your website, generating new leads, and signing on more patients.

OppGen Marketing’s full-service SEO program can help you increase web traffic, generate more leads, and get more patients through your door. Contact us to learn more today.

 

Reputation Management

According to a 2020 survey, 90% of patients use online reviews to evaluate doctors. 

Nearly 75% of patients use reviews as the first step to finding a new doctor. 

But if your clinic has no reviews, that’s a problem.

If someone has a problem or a bad experience in their doctor’s office, they probably won’t make a huge fuss over it in person.  However, they are far more likely to let the world know about it in an online review.

Even if you don’t have a Yelp listing set up, there is a good chance it already exists. Previous patients and Yelp users actually have the ability to establish a listing for you. The good news is that as the owner of your business, you do have the ability to claim your listing. 

By claiming the listing, you will at least be able to respond to dissatisfied patients’ complaints and try to make amends.

 

How to Claim a Yelp Listing

1. Find Your Medical Practice on Yelp

You can start the process of claiming your practice or clinic’s Yelp listing by going to Yelp for Business at biz.yelp.com/claim. From there, Yelp will guide you through the necessary steps to claim your business listing.

If you don’t have the time to claim your Yelp listing, contact OppGen to learn more about our services.

 

2. Create and Verify Your Yelp Account

Next, you’ll need to create an account. Enter your business’s information and email address. Make sure you use an email address you check on a regular basis so you can stay on top of reviews and anything else that happens on your page.

Once you’ve completed creating your account, you’ll need to verify it. With Yelp, you will either receive an email or a phone call with a verification number. Follow the instructions you are given to verify your account.

 

3. Optimize Your Medical Practice’s Yelp Listing

Now that you’ve found your practice’s Yelp listing and set up an account, you need to optimize the listing. This means adding more information about your clinic or practice, such as:

  • Clinic or business hours
  • Contact information
  • High-quality photos of your clinic and/or staff members
  • Your practice’s specialties and background (i.e., why did you decide to open this practice or clinic, information about you and your staff)

Once you’ve added this information, double-check it and even triple-check it. It’s important that all of your clinic’s information is 100% accurate and lines up with the information on your website and other directory listings.

 

Healthcare Providers: How to Respond to Negative Yelp Reviews without Violating HIPAA

One of the most important aspects of Yelp and similar directory sites is the ability for business owners to respond to reviews. Not all reviews necessarily need a response, but negative reviews most certainly do.

But for doctors and medical practitioners, responding to negative reviews — or any review — must be done with care. Including too much detail in a response can result in a potential HIPAA violation.

This can be more difficult for specialty clinics that focus on very specific health issues, such as men’s clinics.

All responses to negative reviews need to be original. They should not be copied-and-pasted responses with changes only to the patient’s name and maybe a few other details. If you want an unhappy patient to return, you need to be sincere, which means a non-personalized response isn’t going to do you any favors. 

If you can address the patient’s complaints without giving away why they were there for treatment, that’s often the best route. Maybe they were upset about the wait time, the state of the office, or poor bedside manners. Those topics are fairly easy to safely address while maintaining patient privacy. 

But if a patient goes into more detail about their treatment or why they were there, be careful. It may seem natural to respond with the reasons for their treatment, but it’s even easier to breach a patient’s privacy in the process.

Here is a safer option: Give a brief response apologizing for their poor experience and ask them to call or email you. This will help circumvent the risk of a HIPAA violation.

Ask yourself: Does my response give away any information about why this patient came to visit? Anything about treatment? If your answer is no, you’re probably in the clear.

 

Contact OppGen for More Information

For more information about setting up a Yelp listing and other medical marketing strategies, contact OppGen today. We’ve worked with hundreds of clinics like yours to generate leads and increase revenue with an improved return on investment.

19
Oct, 2021
A black witch's hat sits upright among fallen leaves on halloween.

By OppGen

How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO

Halloween is coming up right around the corner, but let’s be real: the entire month of October is about monsters, haunted houses, and trick-or-treating. Unfortunately, it seems the trick part of trick-or-treat is around all year when it comes to SEO.

Not all SEO services are good ones; we’ve had clients who have been tricked by what they thought were good SEO practices but were not — they were negative SEO tactics.

Protect yourself from being tricked into signing up for an SEO program that uses negative SEO and other black hat tactics. Better yet, contact OppGen to learn more about our SEO program. We don’t use black hat or negative SEO tactics to get our clients to rank on Page 1 on Google.

 

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is the practice of using unethical techniques to get competitors’ websites to rank lower in search engine results pages (SERPs). It is a type of black hat SEO, which is a phrase often used to describe unethical techniques to rank higher on Google.

While negative SEO may sound like a good practice — after all, you want to rank higher than your competitors — it is one that can do real harm to your website.

Negative SEO can be done in many different ways:

 

Hacking Your Website

Though it’s not the most common form of negative SEO, hacking into a website due to bad security or an easy-to-guess password can certainly wreak havoc on a site. A hacker can do many things to your site that will harm its ranking, such as linking to spammy sites, altering the code in ways to make it harder to access or slower, and changing any information on the site.

 

Copying Content and Posting It All Over on Other Sites

Duplicate content is a bigger problem than you may think: nearly a third of all content on the web is duplicate content. 

Duplicate content is any content on a website that’s the same or similar to other content across a website or several websites. Basically, if the content is the same but the URLs are different, it is considered duplicate content. Duplicate content is a sign of a low-quality website, and if the same content is spread across several other websites, it can lead to your site taking a nosedive in the SERPs.

 

Building Up Hundreds or Thousands of Spammy Links and Backlinks to Your Site

Link building is a key practice when it comes to SEO, and some links are considered significantly better than others for quality. That said, if other websites with very poor domain quality point back to your site, that will affect your website’s ranking for keywords. 

 

Leaving Fake Negative Reviews 

Negative reviews on Google My Business listings and other review websites certainly have an impact that goes further than tanking your website’s SERPs rankings — they can also hurt your business’s reputation and revenue. A Harvard Business School study found that even a 1-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5 to 9% increase in revenue. Another report found 82% of shoppers won’t select a retailer with less than 3 stars.

While negative reviews can (and will) happen, they shouldn’t be occurring too frequently (unless you’re providing incredibly poor service or low-quality products). If you’re suddenly experiencing an influx of negative reviews, you may be getting hit with a slew of fake reviews as part of a competitor’s negative SEO campaign.

 

How Do I Know if My SEO is Negative?

It can be difficult to know whether or not negative SEO is being performed on your site. The key thing to keep in mind is that a sudden drop in rankings does not mean you are the victim of negative SEO; that’s usually due to an update in Google’s algorithms or being filtered out due to the creation of better content.

A better way to be aware of negative SEO is to pay attention to these red flags:

 

Someone Offering to do Negative SEO or SEO Services at a Very Low Cost

This may sound obvious, but the problem is not everyone knows what negative SEO is, let alone what it looks like. And a lot of people do offer it as a service for an incredibly low cost on websites like Fiverr. There are black hat forums all over the web where you can find people discussing how they took down sites using negative SEO.

It’s important to remember that you get what you pay for. While a $5 SEO strategy sounds like a bargain, it’s often going to cost you far more than that $5.

 

Copying and Pasting the Same Content with Minimal Differences

Duplicate content is an easy way for your site to start tanking in the SERPs rankings. Some SEO experts or content writers will reuse the same content repeatedly and then change a word or two. This is a practice that can really hurt your website, so it’s always a good idea to actually read the content that is going up on your website and compare it to other pieces.

 

Buying Links from Blog Networks and Selling Links Without the “nofollow” Attribute

Buying links from blog networks can be something that can potentially affect your site’s SERPs rankings, as it’s considered a black hat SEO tactic.

Similarly, selling your links to other people and not including the “nofollow” attribute to your links can also negatively affect where your site appears on search engines.

As a general rule of thumb, just don’t buy or sell links — it could save you some pain in the long run.

 

What Can I Do to Protect My Website from Negative SEO?

Now that you know what negative SEO looks like, you’re probably wondering how you can protect your site from negative SEO practices.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it should be a good starting point.

 

Keep Your Site’s Security Up to Date

Hacking a website is a surefire strategy to tank that site’s rankings, so it’s important to have all of your security up to date. This might mean updating security patches and plug-ins on a regular basis and making sure your CMS software is strong enough to protect your information in a cyber attack or security breach.

If you’re still using an HTTP address, you need to migrate your site to HTTPS as soon as possible. HTTPS is more secure than HTTP web addresses and this is especially important if you’re running an e-commerce business. It protects your customers’ valuable data, like credit cards, from being stolen and abused by hackers. As a bonus, HTTPS sites are now considered a ranking factor for SEO.

It’s also important to change your password and make sure it is difficult to guess. Avoid playing “games” on Facebook and other social media sites that ask questions are commonly used when requesting a lo for lost password information, such as:

  • What is the name of your childhood pet?
  • What is your mother’s maiden name?
  • What street did you live on in first grade?
  • What was the name of your third-grade teacher?

Just to name a few.

It’s also a good idea to install 2-step verification passwords on your websites and email addresses as well. With WordPress, you can install the Google Authenticator Plugin to add an extra step for logging in, which will send a random code generated by Google Authenticator to your smartphone. It might be a slight nuisance, but it’s an easy thing to do that can keep hackers at bay.

 

Perform Link Audits on a Regular Basis

An influx of bad backlinks can certainly hurt your SERPs position, which is why it’s always a good idea to run a link audit through a service like SEMrush. There, you can review your backlinks and see if you’re dealing with any spammy links. Be sure to check every link that appears to be spammy or negative — not all of these links are bad backlinks. Some may just be from websites with low domain authority, and that doesn’t make it a bad link. 

Once you have a list of bad backlinks, you can go to Google Search Console and submit those links to be disavowed.

 

Use a Plagiarism Checker 

Duplicate content is easy to find thanks to plagiarism checkers. Try using a free one like Copyscape to see if your content is being plagiarized by other websites. If your content is being plagiarized on other sites, you have a few options:

  • Email the webmaster. It could be they do not know their content has been lifted directly from your site. You can send an email to let them know the situation and request that they remove the page.
  • Submit a DMCA takedown notice to the ISP. In more difficult cases, such as a webmaster denying that it is your content in the first place and refusing to remove it (or they simply won’t respond to the email), you’ll have to submit a DMCA takedown request to their online service provider. DMCA.com can help you get started on preparing this legal document that will have the ISP or hosting company remove the content from the website and other information about the law. Google also has a copyright infringement removal form you can use. 

 

Pay Attention to Google My Business Reviews

Unless your business has gone viral for something bad, you shouldn’t be seeing an onslaught of negative reviews on your Google My Business listing. In such an event, you might be dealing with someone spamming your listing with fake negative reviews.

Thankfully you can flag and report fake reviews on Google My Business. You can do it through Google Maps, a Google search for your Google My Business Profile, and your Google My Business account. Simply find the review you want to report and follow the instructions in the video below:

Keep in mind that this should not be used for real negative reviews or reviews you dislike or disagree with. With real negative reviews, you should at least respond to them.

 

Protect Your Website from Negative SEO This Spooky Season — or Any Time of the Year — with OppGen

Hopefully this blog has made negative SEO a little less scary. It’s not a common phenomenon, but it is still important to be aware of negative SEO and black hat SEO tactics, as they go hand in hand.

If you think you may be dealing with negative SEO, please fill out our digital audit. Our SEO team will review your website and let you know if anything seems awry. We’ll also make suggestions as to how you can improve your website through SEO strategies. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or want more information.

14
Jul, 2021
a lawyer records blog ideas on a notebook

By OppGen

How Important Are Blogs to Legal SEO?

What is SEO and Why Does It Matter for Law Firms and the Legal Industry?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a digital marketing strategy with the goal of getting your website to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keyword searches.

Unlike search ads, SEO is an organic strategy, meaning you don’t pay the search engine to place your law firm’s website on SERPs for certain keywords.

Depending on the area of law your law firm specializes in, paid search ads can be very expensive. For example, personal injury law ads are one of the most expensive advertising segments on Google — and that is across all industries, not just the legal industry.

SEO is a marketing strategy that can help bring in more clients and cases more efficiently, more consistently, and more cost-effectively compared to other options (though you certainly can — and should — invest in paid search and SEO).

OppGen Marketing’s SEO packages include blog posts written by our in-house content writing team. Contact us to learn more about our SEO services.

 

Why are Blogs Important for Legal SEO?

The best legal SEO programs are made up of 4 components:

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on tackling issues like website speed and coding. Google has been moving toward a mobile-first system with SEO, meaning that websites are judged first by how quickly they load on mobile devices.

At this point, it is a must to have a website coded for mobile devices and not just desktop computers.

2. Local SEO

In most cases, law firms are local to specific locations. This puts them at a good advantage for SEO provided they know how to use it.

One common Google search involves looking for a service or company “near me.” Google takes a searcher’s physical location at the time of their search and will display whatever they searched near them based on that location. When a prospective client nearby searches for “law firm near me,” it’s imperative that your law firm shows up, whether as a search result or on Google Maps.

One way to do this involves making sure your law firm has a Google My Business account with the correct business name, address, and phone number. It also helps to make sure your law firm is listed in relevant directories, too, and in the legal field, there are many listing options available to you.

3. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO revolves around the content on your website. “Content” can be many things: videos, podcasts, photos, and blogs.

For those slightly familiar with on-page SEO, you might think that filling up a webpage with the same keyword over and over again can get you to rank high. This is no longer the case.

Today, on-page SEO means you need to create highly detailed, relevant content that your target audience finds valuable. This also means you need to make sure your content is readable — not only will your target audience be reading this, but so will search engines. Search engines read websites similarly to how humans do.

4. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the processes of link building, shares on social media, and getting five-star reviews.

Link building occurs when links on other websites point back to your law firm’s website. The more links that direct people to your law firm’s site, the better (as long as those pointing back to you are good resources, that is), because search engines recognize that when more people are sharing your content, it means your content is useful.

What Do Any of Those 4 Components Have to do with the Importance of Blogging for SEO?

Each of these components play a key role in SEO, and you can’t have one without the others if you truly wish to have an effective SEO strategy.

That said, blogging is a key part of on-page SEO strategies. Even though you can’t keyword stuff pages anymore, you still can create valuable content for your target audience. It’s those pages that are most likely to be shared with others and can help you build a system of backlinks, pushing your website higher up on SERPs for relevant keywords.

Although search engines are beginning to include audio and video into searches, blogging will always be one of the most efficient and simplest ways to rank on Google and Bing for relevant keyword searches.

It’s much easier to set up a target keyword and try to rank for it compared to audio and video, which are still new. Compared to those other mediums, blogging has a lower entry point. Videos and audio require equipment and editing software. If you don’t know how to edit audio or video (both of which are time-consuming processes), you’re going to struggle to create good content, which is the goal of on-page SEO.

Everyone can write — but that doesn’t mean just anyone should.

Why Should I Have a legal SEO Writer?

Though you don’t necessarily need to hire a legal SEO writer, you should consider working with someone who writes with SEO in mind.

Writing isn’t as easy as it looks, and that goes for SEO content writing, too. Writing about a subject you’re overly familiar with often means you may use jargon that most readers won’t understand. Let’s be honest: the average American isn’t going to read a legal document for fun. Most legal documents are dry and hard to read. That is the exact opposite of what you need for your law firm’s blog.

You can’t write a blog for a more general audience (compared to your colleagues in the legal industry, at least) that’s written like a legal document. It needs to be simplified in a way that anyone can understand. And that is a skill not everyone has.

It’s important to have a good writer who understands SEO and can weave target keywords into an easy-to-read blog post.

How to Write a Good Legal Blog Using SEO

Choose Your Keywords

The keywords you choose to target will determine the likelihood of your website ranking for those keyword searches. Some keywords are nearly impossible to rank for, while others are easy to rank for but aren’t searched very often. You won’t know the keyword difficulty or search volume unless you use a website like SEMrush or ahrefs. These websites track keywords, search volume, keyword difficulty, and more. Ideally, you’ll want to use keywords with a relatively low keyword difficulty and high search volume. These websites do require subscriptions. If you don’t understand some of the terms or ranking information on these sites, it may be a better investment to partner with a marketing agency that has access to them and will create content for you, such as OppGen Marketing.

Another consideration to take into account: Would someone who is looking for your law firm’s services use any of the keywords you may want to use? If not, drop those from the list. Knowing your audience and what keywords they could use matters a lot.

Last but not least, make sure your keywords are relevant to what it is you offer. Relevance is really important, and you don’t want to market something you don’t offer. But that doesn’t mean you are limited to just writing about legal issues. Look into a newsjacking approach. Newsjacking is a strategy that utilizes current events and writing about them from an angle you’re familiar with. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer, you could write about the Surfside condominium collapse in Florida and discuss what legal actions, if any, people have in a situation like that one. 

There are many different topics and keywords out there — it’s a matter of researching them.

Make an Outline

Before creating the blog, make an outline and think about section headers. Blogs should not be formatted like a book or legal document. They need to be broken up into sections. Not only that but these sections should also be related to your keywords. If you can make sure your keywords are part of some of the headers (your keywords should always be included in the h1 header, which is also known as the title header).

Other SEO blog outlining tips:

  • Include your keyword(s) in the h1/title head and at least one in an h2 header
  • Use only one h1/title header per blog
  • Make subsections using h2, h3, h4, and make sure that h2 is larger than h3 and h3 is larger than h4
  • Make the last section header a call to action (CTA)

Write the Blog Post

Now that you’ve created the outline, you can finally start writing the actual blog post. You can certainly use the target keywords a few times, but be careful not to overdo it.

If you include images in your blog (and you should!), make sure you utilize the alt text tag. Alt text describes the image and will appear on screen readers. This helps people with visual impairments know what is in the image. Plus, it’s a good place to include a keyword, but the keyword is not the most important thing with alt tags — that would be accessibility.

Have Someone Outside Your Law Firm Review the Blog

As much as you may want to have one of your fellow attorneys review the blog post, it’s a good idea to have someone who isn’t in the legal profession read it. This could be a friend, a spouse, or the person who handles all of your law firm’s communication. As long as they don’t have a law degree or practice law, anyone is fair game.

Once you find someone to read and review the blog, ask them to summarize what exactly it is they just read. If they’re able to summarize what it was about correctly after reading it, congrats! You have a blog post that is accessible to the general public.

Post the Blog

Now that you’ve had the blog reviewed and made any edits or changes as needed, it’s time to post the blog to your law firm’s website. But there are a few things you need to include before you hit that post button, starting with a featured image.

With featured images, it’s important to use an image you have the rights to use. There are free stock photo sites that allow you to use photos for free, such as Pexels; and then there are subscription-based sites like Shutterstock. Both types of sites have their advantages and disadvantages, so it is a good idea to use both.

Another option for images is Creative Commons, which allows you to use images provided you follow the requirements for each type of license. For example, most Creative Commons content requires you to credit its creator. This can be done at the bottom of the blog post. But make sure you review each license carefully; there are some that will not let you use the content for commercial purposes. Others won’t let you modify the images in any way. Always review the Creative Commons license before using any content. 

You’ll need a meta description, too. Meta descriptions are the summaries that appear on individual search results. Meta descriptions should include the keywords you want to try to rank for and should be no longer than 160 characters in length. Anything longer than that will be cut off.

You can also adjust how the blog’s title (known as a title tag) will appear on search engines, too. It’s generally recommended that your title tag is somewhere between 50 to 70 characters in length, though Google has said there is no limit to the title tag’s character length. However, there is still a cut-off point measured in pixels, and this is where using a plug-in like Yoast can come in handy, as it can give you an idea of when the title tag is too long.

When posting your final draft of the blog, make sure its URL contains the keywords you want to rank for, too. This makes it easier for search engines to find, and it’s far more organized than letting the content management system (sometimes abbreviated as CMS) use the publication date or a string of random numbers for the URL.

Another thing to check before hitting that publish button: use your name as the author of the blog post to help establish not only your law firm’s authority, but yours, too. 

If you don’t want to publish your blog immediately, most content management systems allow you to schedule it for publication on a specific date and time. Otherwise, go ahead and click the publish button.

And now, you wait for an increase in traffic and hopefully emails and phone calls from prospective clients. Keep in mind that SEO is not immediate or automatic — it will take time before you see any increases in clients.

Share the Blog to Social Media

Your post has been published. Now what? Easy: Share the blog to your law firm’s social media accounts. It’s an easy way to build up backlinks and possibly have others in your social (media) circle share it, too.

You may want to sit back and celebrate the publication and shares of your first legal SEO blog — but the journey’s not over yet. You’ll have to keep creating SEO-friendly blogs if you want to continue to see an increase in clients for your law firm. Search engine optimization is an ongoing strategy that never truly ends. Once you start, you should not stop.

Contact OppGen for More Information

For some people, the fact that SEO is a never-ending strategy is too much to deal with. It’s too easy to run out of blog topics or keywords. Maybe you’re too busy to keep track of SEO.

Whatever the reason, it’s a good idea to hire a legal SEO writer or a digital marketing company that can create original content for your law firm’s website and brings in more clients. And OppGen Marketing is here to do just that.

To learn more about OppGen’s legal SEO marketing program, contact us today, or fill out our free digital audit for valuable feedback about where you can improve your law firm’s SEO strategy and more.

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